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In England we talk about getting your knickers in a twist but I like the American version, recently imparted to me here when it seemed to my correspondent I was losing my cool. Whatever.

I want to know what silly little things get people pissed. The more trivial the better. For example, we (in the UK) have a national radio station, BBC radio 5, which mostly broadcasts sport and news, which it punctuates with short traffic news announcements the sheer pointlessness of which freak me out.

The UK is not big, like Texas, but all the same it's big enough and these reports will mention like three things: say a motorway is closed, or there has been a flood somewhere or maybe some rail disruption and that will be about it. Now, first, the chances of you being able to benefit from the information are slim - the motorway will be in Scotland and you are in southern England. Second, the reports are not confined to incidents of the utmost seriousness so they are just random selections of a couple of things out of hundreds. Just because you don't hear anything bad going on in your area doesn't mean everything's fine. And third, the reports are out of date. The one and only time a report coincided with my own travel was when I was told Kew bridge, which lay not far ahead on my way to work, was completely impassable due to sheer weight of traffic. When I got there a couple of minutes later it was clearer than I had ever seen it!

Now, please don't tell me I should be listening to local stations for traffic news. I already know and I don't care about the traffic. What bunches my pants is the eternal question: why are these stupid morons broadcasting this stuff at all?

1. Clothes hangers tangling when I'm trying to hang laundry.
2. People blocking walkways or halls or aisles by their total disregard of making room for other people who want to go past them.
3. Litterbugs.

My solutions, in an ideal world where I can get away with such things, would be:
1. Clothes that hover, and thereby don't require hangers.
2. I be allowed to slice off the blocking portions of persons with a lightsaber, that I might continue my travel.
3. Litterbugs should be forcefed whatever they littered. I am merciful enough to allow lit cigarettes to be extinguished first. Against the offender's eyeball.

In England we talk about getting your knickers in a twist but I like the American version, recently imparted to me here when it seemed to my correspondent I was losing my cool. Whatever.

I want to know what silly little things get people pissed. The more trivial the better. For example, we (in the UK) have a national radio station, BBC radio 5, which mostly broadcasts sport and news, which it punctuates with short traffic news announcements the sheer pointlessness of which freak me out.

The UK is not big, like Texas, but all the same it's big enough and these reports will mention like three things: say a motorway is closed, or there has been a flood somewhere or maybe some rail disruption and that will be about it. Now, first, the chances of you being able to benefit from the information are slim - the motorway will be in Scotland and you are in southern England. Second, the reports are not confined to incidents of the utmost seriousness so they are just random selections of a couple of things out of hundreds. Just because you don't hear anything bad going on in your area doesn't mean everything's fine. And third, the reports are out of date. The one and only time a report coincided with my own travel was when I was told Kew bridge, which lay not far ahead on my way to work, was completely impassable due to sheer weight of traffic. When I got there a couple of minutes later it was clearer than I had ever seen it!

Now, please don't tell me I should be listening to local stations for traffic news. I already know and I don't care about the traffic. What bunches my pants is the eternal question: why are these stupid morons broadcasting this stuff at all?

When I climb into bed and my toes run across wrinkles in the fitted sheet by my foot.
When you stop in a parkinglot to let someone cross but they are moving at a snail's pace because they are so engrossed in their phone.
Groups of people who insist on walking in a row, with strollers.

Speaking of Texas, it gets my goat (his name is Farquar) when someone says they are going up to Dallas, when in fact they are going to Fort Worth.

Fort Worth is my home town. It is NOT a suburb of Dallas. It is the county seat of a completely different county. It has its OWN suburbs. And, most importantly, one can drive through it without being constantly shunted into decaying neighborhoods with a higher crime rate than Juarez.

What makes me even more angry is when I mention this pet peeve, and people say, "So what? Who gives a flip about your home town?"

__________________To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.

Woo's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by aliens.

1. Clothes hangers tangling when I'm trying to hang laundry.2. People blocking walkways or halls or aisles by their total disregard of making room for other people who want to go past them.3. Litterbugs.

2. Gawd, man! Do you live in Japan too? In this country, it is not just walkways and aisles, it is wide thoroughfares and roads and any area in which places can be blocked off. People, mostly old ladies, will fan out in any given large space in an almost perfect blocking movement that prevents anyone passing them.

Getting 15 inches of snow dumped on my ass, the lights going out for hours and having to dig out the packed snow from the driveway after the snowplow comes, which makes me think of this little 'diary entry' (beware! naughty words!) about the snowplow as I break my back and my poor little toes freeze tearing down the wall of snow and running out of places to put it.

Getting 15 inches of snow dumped on my ass, the lights going out for hours and having to dig out the packed snow from the driveway after the snowplow comes, which makes me think of this little 'diary entry' (beware! naughty words!) about the snowplow as I break my back and my poor little toes freeze tearing down the wall of snow and running out of places to put it.

The only thing worse is when the snowplow doesn't come!

LOL - very good but you didn't read the OP properly and I am tempted to nominate report this as a blatant derail. It's trivia we're after, not major life-threatening conditions. Things that freak you out.

One of them is that it freaks me out that I can get freaked out over nothing. Something like that.

I used to get really annoyed by people who would park their shopping cart in the checkout line and go back to look for more items.

Now I just roll their cart out of the way, and get in line after all my shopping is done, as God intended.

I still hate long checkout lines, people who brought their change jar to pay with, and people who, knowing I would have pushed their cart out of the way, ask the cashier to finish their shopping for them after their transaction has already begun. Also, cashiers who indulge them in this request.

I used to get really annoyed by people who would park their shopping cart in the checkout line and go back to look for more items.

Now I just roll their cart out of the way, and get in line after all my shopping is done, as God intended.

I still hate long checkout lines, people who brought their change jar to pay with, and people who, knowing I would have pushed their cart out of the way, ask the cashier to finish their shopping for them after their transaction has already begun. Also, cashiers who indulge them in this request.

What happened to the little old ladies who used to take forever to pay, getting their purse out of a bag that was deep down inside another bag, itself possibly in another bag, having to take their gloves off first, and then either:
a) paying in small coin (as you observe) or, even worse
b) paying by card-backed cheque (check)?

LOL - very good but you didn't read the OP properly and I am tempted to nominate report this as a blatant derail. It's trivia we're after, not major life-threatening conditions. Things that freak you out.

One of them is that it freaks me out that I can get freaked out over nothing. Something like that.

It is trivial, it's just winter in Wisconsin, I should be used to it by now. I just wanted to snivel about it somewhere.

What happened to the little old ladies who used to take forever to pay, getting their purse out of a bag that was deep down inside another bag, itself possibly in another bag, having to take their gloves off first, and then either:
a) paying in small coin (as you observe) or, even worse
b) paying by card-backed cheque (check)?

I haven't seen one of those for ages.

It's annoying but there's no rule against using checks to pay for groceries. What really gets me in a bunch, though, is when they wait till everything is rung up to even take their checkbook out. It's not like there was any question that your groceries were going to cost something. You knew you were going to have to write this check. Is there any reason that you couldn't take out your checkbook and begin filling out the check, while you were standing there, doing absolutely nothing?

I used to get really annoyed by people who would park their shopping cart in the checkout line and go back to look for more items.

Now I just roll their cart out of the way, and get in line after all my shopping is done, as God intended.

I still hate long checkout lines, people who brought their change jar to pay with, and people who, knowing I would have pushed their cart out of the way, ask the cashier to finish their shopping for them after their transaction has already begun. Also, cashiers who indulge them in this request.

Originally Posted by anglolawyer

What happened to the little old ladies who used to take forever to pay, getting their purse out of a bag that was deep down inside another bag, itself possibly in another bag, having to take their gloves off first, and then either:
a) paying in small coin (as you observe) or, even worse
b) paying by card-backed cheque (check)?

I haven't seen one of those for ages.

Oh Gawd! And what about those old ladies in Japan, obatarians and obasan they're called, who either go to the ATMs and do all their banking there for hours on end, or the people who work on the checkouts carefully wrapping up groceries in multiple wrappings. Oooh grrrrrrr.... going to bed!

I could go on for some time, I imagine....
However, referencing the above grocery-store annoyances...
There is a class of (usually senior) individual who will check their entire take of groceries, and only then produce a huge folder of coupons, each of which must be examined and scanned and argued over...
And only then produce the ancient wallet from which meticulously every dollar must be carefully extracted.. And THEN the change purse... "Oh, I have the change" which must likewise be extracted purse or pants and meticulously opened and each coin extracted...

All while you're standing there with a carton of rapidly-melting ice cream.

Here it's an African American thing to block traffic by stopping your car in the middle of the road and hold a conversation out the window of the car.
It's a hillbilly thing to do the same in the aisles of the Walmart.
I mean come-on you must have text-ed your friend half a dozen time today, really!
How about people that think that standards, laws and rules of the road have no application in a parking lot, cutting between parked cars, completely disregarding the lanes, so on and so on.
Grump grump grump

I used to get really annoyed by people who would park their shopping cart in the checkout line and go back to look for more items.

Now I just roll their cart out of the way, and get in line after all my shopping is done, as God intended.

Can't do that with the variant I was most annoyed with: a couple goes shopping, one stays with the cart at the checkout line, while the other goes back looking for more items.

Originally Posted by sgtbaker

It's annoying but there's no rule against using checks to pay for groceries. What really gets me in a bunch, though, is when they wait till everything is rung up to even take their checkbook out. It's not like there was any question that your groceries were going to cost something. You knew you were going to have to write this check. Is there any reason that you couldn't take out your checkbook and begin filling out the check, while you were standing there, doing absolutely nothing?

Haven't seen cheques here for ages. The analogue here would be those who only start the transaction with their debit card after the cashier has run up the total. The supermarket chain I frequent (the biggest in the country) has debit card machines that allow you to enter your PIN code (and have it validated, which is the biggest time factor) before OK-aying the amount. Or those who only start looking for their debit card in their purse after the cashier has run up the total...

Thank Dog my local supermarket now has hand scanners and a self check-out area.

This is something that only started recently (like in the last few years).

You are driving behind a guy and approaching traffic lights were you can either stop behind him or side by side. The right hand lane (remember we drive on the left), which you are both in as you approach, is for going straight on or turning right. What he should do is give you plenty of warning he is going to turn right so you can move over to the nearside lane as you approach the lights. But no one does this anymore. Everyone sits at the lights and starts indicating only when they turn green. You are now stuck behind one guy who cannot turn right due to the volume of oncoming traffic while cars in the nearside lane go sailing by in tight formation and at speed which prevents you moving across.

1. Clothes hangers tangling when I'm trying to hang laundry.
2. People blocking walkways or halls or aisles by their total disregard of making room for other people who want to go past them.
3. Litterbugs.

The hodgy thumbs up seal of approval is formally awarded to this post.

A huge percentage of the sites on the internet that end in .com. Most of them appear to be set up in such a way as to maximise the number of adverts they shove in your face, both by the sheer number of them on the screen and the fact they dole out the actual content a hundred or two words at a time, forcing you to click "Next" to get to see more.

I use a 'hosts' file and a JavaScript blocker to kill most of the ads, and try the "Print Article" feature for the other issue, but it's still annoying.

In a way I'm happy that I'm part of a small minority who know how to do this. If everyone blocked ads as aggressively as the knowledgeable geeks do, the Web would be about one-tenth of one percentper rmille basis point of its current size and scope.

__________________The social illusion reigns to-day upon all the heaped-up ruins of the past, and to it belongs the future. The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Gustav Le Bon, The Crowd, 1895 (from the French)Canadian or living in Canada? PM me if you want an entry on the list of Canadians on the forum.

__________________As cultural anthropologists have always said "human culture" = "human nature". You might as well put a fish on the moon to test how it "swims naturally" without the "influence of water". -Earthborn

Well if it has to be really trivial then I guess it's when I hear people say:
"Me and someone" instead of "Someone and I".
I have to stop myself from correcting their grammar because people who go around correcting other people's grammar is just so annoying

Well if it has to be really trivial then I guess it's when I hear people say:
"Me and someone" instead of "Someone and I".
I have to stop myself from correcting their grammar because people who go around correcting other people's grammar is just so annoying

Along the lines of the OP, In my town there is only one freeway. The only other option is a very few thoroughfares. If you're using the freeway, that's it. So what good are traffic reports? If you're stuck, you're stuck. Period.